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Online hatred of women in the Incels.me Forum: Linguistic analysis and automatic detection
Abstract
This paper presents a study of the (now suspended) online discussion forum Incels.me and its users, involuntary celibates or incels , a virtual community of isolated men without a sexual life, who see women as the cause of their problems and often use the forum for misogynistic hate speech and other forms of incitement. Involuntary celibates have attracted media attention and concern, after a killing spree in April 2018 in Toronto, Canada. The aim of this study is to shed light on the group dynamics of the incel community, by applying mixed-methods quantitative and qualitative approaches to analyze how the users of the forum create in-group identity and how they construct major out-groups, particularly women. We investigate the vernacular used by incels, apply automatic profiling techniques to determine who they are, discuss the hate speech posted in the forum, and propose a Deep Learning system that is able to detect instances of misogyny, homophobia, and racism, with approximately 95% accuracy.
... Until recently, there has been little research undertaken to explore incels. The work that has emerged has generally centered around qualitative and textual analyses of popular incel forums on Reddit or stand-alone websites that have painted incels as violent and misogynistic (Baele et al., 2021;Ging, 2019;Glace et al., 2021;Helm et al., 2022;Jaki et al., 2019;Jones, 2020;Maxwell et al., 2020;O'Malley et al., 2020); however, due to the methodologies employed and the prevalence of "shit-posting" among incels, these works may better describe the sociocultural context of incel communities rather than incels themselves (Daly & Nichols, 2023;Guimarães et al., 2019;Jasser et al., 2022). ...
... In exploring what words most frequently co-occurred with the word women in the incels.me forum, Jaki et al. (2019) identified a number of word pairings that represented either similar maliciousness or deviousness, including that they are "entitled," "parasites," "whores," and "sluts," who "crave" both "superior males" and "big dicks." Jaki et al. (2019) labeled these as examples of rampant misogyny that characterized a whopping 30% of threads analyzed. ...
... forum, Jaki et al. (2019) identified a number of word pairings that represented either similar maliciousness or deviousness, including that they are "entitled," "parasites," "whores," and "sluts," who "crave" both "superior males" and "big dicks." Jaki et al. (2019) labeled these as examples of rampant misogyny that characterized a whopping 30% of threads analyzed. What is lost in this classification is the clear distrust that incels have in women, which may underlie the expression of misogynistic content, whether deliberate or not. ...
Incel refers to an online group of young males who feel frustration and despair at being repeatedly neglected on the dating market. Despite gaining notoriety for a number of public attacks, the majority of incel research is comprised of analyses of their forums rather than of individuals themselves. This provides a good contextual overview of the incel community but does not capture the experiences of incels or identify how and why this group responds so strongly to rejection. A total of 38 incel and 107 non-incel males (MAGE = 23.60, SD = 4.90) were recruited through Reddit and two institutional forums to participate in the present online study, completing questionnaires pertaining to their dating app experiences and their mental and relational well-being. Large differences between incels and non-incels were found, with the former reporting greater depressive symptoms, rejection sensitivity, relationship status influence, and insecure attachment. These were all associated with perceived popularity, which incels scored lower on. Incels also adopted more liberal dating app strategies, yet reported fewer matches, conversations, and in-person outcomes. The pattern of results reported sheds new light on the role that dating apps may play in incels' efforts to attract mates and how these frustrations manifest. This is integral both to understanding the broader incel discourse as well as any efforts to develop treatment strategies with self-identified incels who seek counseling.
... Many incels engage in misogynistic online hostility (Jaki et al., 2019), and a small proportion of incels have committed acts of violence (Costello & Buss, 2023). An estimated 59 people have been killed by incels worldwide (Hoffman et al., 2020). ...
... Incels also share several characteristics with adult virgins, including a significant fear of having irretrievably "missed out" on meaningful life experiences (Stijelja & Mishara, 2022). In recent years, research on incels has grown, examining a range of topics, including textual analysis of misogyny (Jaki et al., 2019), and experiences using dating apps (Sparks et al., 2022). However, the bulk of prior incel research employed secondary analysis, which is informative but limited because many incels use bravado and exaggeration in order to engage in what they describe as "trolling" (Daly & Nichols, 2023). ...
... If low mate-value men doubt their abilities to protect and provide (needed for benevolent sexism), they may not embrace the benevolent sexism that can offset hostility and facilitate romantic attraction (Bosson et al., 2021;Gul & Kupfer, 2019). Much of incels' online rhetoric can be considered misogynistic (Jaki et al., 2019) and we know that unwanted celibacy is a predictor of misogyny in men (Grunau et al., 2022). The misogyny that pervades the incel community may be indicative of a low sense of self perceived mate value that exists within individual incels. ...
Mating represents a suite of fundamental adaptive problems for humans. Yet a community of men, called incels (involuntary celibates), forge their identity around their perceived inability to solve these problems. Many incels engage in misogynistic online hostility, and there are concerns about violence stemming from the community. Despite significant media speculation about the potential mating psychology of incels, this has yet to be formally investigated in the scientific literature. In the first formal investigation of incel mating psychology, we compared a sample (n = 151) of self-identified male incels with non-incel single males (n = 149). Findings revealed that incels have a lower sense of self-perceived mate-value and a greater external locus of control regarding their singlehood. Contrary to mainstream media narratives, incels also reported lower minimum standards for mate preferences than non-incels. Incels (and non-incel single men) significantly overestimated the importance of physical attractiveness and financial prospects to women, and underestimated the importance of intelligence, kindness, and humor. Furthermore, incels underestimated women's overall minimum mate preference standards. Our findings suggest that incels should be targeted for interventions to challenge cognitive distortions around female mate preferences. Implications for incels' mental health and misogynistic attitudes are discussed, as well as directions for future research. "Women seem wicked when you're unwanted."-Jim Morrison (The Doors)
... Though some work in natural language processing (NLP) has focused on features of misogynist language in general Samghabadi et al., 2020;Guest et al., 2021), online incel communities are known for significant lexical innovation (Farrell et al., 2020;Gothard, 2021). Training with data from incel forums would enable misogynist hate speech classifiers to identify the neologisms and novel ideological features of this dangerous form of online misogyny (Jaki et al., 2019). ...
... Quantitative and computational studies of the manosphere often focus on the unique misogynist language use of these communities. Gothard (2021) and Jaki et al. (2019) surface incel jargon by comparing word frequencies in incel Reddit posts with subreddits and Wikipedia articles outside of the incel movement, while Farrell et al. (2020) find frequent incel terms not present in English dictionaries and expand their lexicon with a word embedding space. Such word frequency analysis, as well as hand-crafted lexicons, are often used to measure and study misogyny in the manosphere (Heritage et al., 2019;Farrell et al., 2019;Jaki et al., 2019). ...
... Gothard (2021) and Jaki et al. (2019) surface incel jargon by comparing word frequencies in incel Reddit posts with subreddits and Wikipedia articles outside of the incel movement, while Farrell et al. (2020) find frequent incel terms not present in English dictionaries and expand their lexicon with a word embedding space. Such word frequency analysis, as well as hand-crafted lexicons, are often used to measure and study misogyny in the manosphere (Heritage et al., 2019;Farrell et al., 2019;Jaki et al., 2019). Pruden (2021) and Perry and DeDeo (2021) use topic modeling to characterize narratives and map out user trajectories on incels.is ...
... Though some work in natural language processing (NLP) has focused on features of misogynist language in general Samghabadi et al., 2020;Guest et al., 2021), online incel communities are known for significant lexical innovation (Farrell et al., 2020;Gothard, 2021). Training with data from incel forums would enable misogynist hate speech classifiers to identify the neologisms and novel ideological features of this dangerous form of online misogyny (Jaki et al., 2019). ...
... Quantitative and computational studies of the manosphere often focus on the unique misogynist language use of these communities. Gothard (2021) and Jaki et al. (2019) surface incel jargon by comparing word frequencies in incel Reddit posts with subreddits and Wikipedia articles outside of the incel movement, while Farrell et al. (2020) find frequent incel terms not present in English dictionaries and expand their lexicon with a word embedding space. Such word frequency analysis, as well as hand-crafted lexicons, are often used to measure and study misogyny in the manosphere (Heritage et al., 2019;Farrell et al., 2019;Jaki et al., 2019). ...
... Gothard (2021) and Jaki et al. (2019) surface incel jargon by comparing word frequencies in incel Reddit posts with subreddits and Wikipedia articles outside of the incel movement, while Farrell et al. (2020) find frequent incel terms not present in English dictionaries and expand their lexicon with a word embedding space. Such word frequency analysis, as well as hand-crafted lexicons, are often used to measure and study misogyny in the manosphere (Heritage et al., 2019;Farrell et al., 2019;Jaki et al., 2019). Pruden (2021) and Perry and DeDeo (2021) use topic modeling to characterize narratives and map out user trajectories on incels.is ...
Online communities of involuntary celibates (incels) are a prominent source of misogynist hate speech. In this paper, we use quantitative text and network analysis approaches to examine how identity groups are discussed on incels.is, the largest black-pilled incels forum. We find that this community produces a wide range of novel identity terms and, while terms for women are most common, mentions of other minoritized identities are increasing. An analysis of the associations made with identity groups suggests an essentialist ideology where physical appearance, as well as gender and racial hierarchies, determine human value. We discuss implications for research into automated misogynist hate speech detection.
... Involuntary celibates or "Incels" refer to an online subculture, composed predominantly of young heterosexual men who, due to a perceived lifelong history of romantic rejection and marginalization, express rage towards women and society at large (Hoffman, Ware, & Shapiro, 2020;Horta Ribeiro et al., 2021;Jaki et al., 2019;Speckhard, Ellenberg, Morton, & Ash, 2021;Van Brunt & Taylor, 2020). Incels believe that their incessant rejection is due to physical appearance (e.g., facial structure, height, ethnicity, and musculature) and other factors beyond their control (e.g., mental illness and personality characteristics such as shyness). ...
... Within the Incel community, to "take the red pill" is to see society, with its preference for physically attractive and socially dominant individuals, as unfairly structured against the Incel, as they see themselves as ugly, unwanted and low on the social hierarchy. Some with this view may maintain some hope of sexual conquest, either with less desirable women (Jaki et al., 2019) or through advancement on the social hierarchy by altering one's physical appearance by way physical fitness, steroids or, in extreme cases, plastic surgery (Hines, 2019). While these individuals still maintain their misogynistic views of women, their worldview is not as bleak as their "black pill" adopting brethren. ...
... Researchers who have undertaken the study of Incels have done so through a variety of methods. For instance, many researchers have analyzed the content of Incels posts (Jaki et al., 2019;O'Malley et al., 2020;Pra_ zmo, 2020;Tranchese & Sugiura, 2021) or the migration of users between Incel forums and forums devoted to other, overlapping ideologies (Horta Ribeiro et al., 2021). Fewer researchers have surveyed Incels (Scaptura & Boyle, 2020;Speckhard et al., 2021) or interviewed them directly (Daly & Reed, 2022). ...
Incels, also known as “involuntary celibates,” are an online subculture comprised of mostly heterosexual men who describe themselves as unable to obtain a sexual partner despite their desire and effort to do so. The group often externalizes the reasons for this failure, blaming societal structures and ideals as well as feminist movements. In recent years, some within this subculture have become radicalized. The violent ideologies of Incels have been linked to several mass shootings, including those committed by Elliot Rodger and Jake Davison. Although some Incels have attempted to use evolutionary psychology to justify their anger and ideology, this paper aims to turn the evolutionary lens back on Incels to explore Incels’ core features of misogyny, group identity, suicidality and violence. Incels attempt to establish and maintain a social “in-group,” strive to eliminate sexual competition, and attempt to bypass female mate choice. The paper explores how Incels use of evolutionary psychology principles and highlights the benefits that studying Incels, both in general and through an evolutionary lens, can yield.
Access full article at: https://akjournals.com/view/journals/2055/aop/article-10.1556-2055.2022.00016/article-10.1556-2055.2022.00016.xml
... Minassian paid homage to fellow incel (a portmanteau of involuntary celibate), Elliot Rodger, who killed six people and himself during a series of violent attacks in Isla Vista, California in 2014 (Duke, 2014). On the one hand, Rodger has been heralded as a martyr and the "supreme gentleman" of the incel community for the attack and the dissemination of his manifesto, in which he framed his violence as "retribution" for women having denied him the opportunity to have sex (Byerly, 2020;Jaki et al., 2019;Mandel, 2018). On the other hand, incel endorsement of Rodger and other incels who have engaged in public acts of violence is relatively low (Moskalenko et al., 2022;Speckhard et al., 2021). ...
... While the news coverage of incel-perpetrated violence is largely sensational, Byerly's (2020) analysis of 70 news articles-which spanned 29 outlets in six countries-suggests that the content is an accurate portrayal of incel behaviours, ideologies, and the community as a whole. Indeed, Byerly's claim that online communities promote of violence and misogyny is supported across multiple content analyses of several incel forums (Baele et al., 2021;Jaki et al., 2019;Maxwell et al., 2020;O'Malley et al., 2020). ...
... A recent textual analysis of 100 discussion threads on the incels.me forum identified loneliness as one of the top 1,000 keywords, with the authors concluding that this constitutes a core aspect of inceldom (Jaki et al., 2019). This may help explain why only 18% of incels in Sparks et al. (2022) reported having pictures with friends in their dating application profile compared to 52% of non-incel men. ...
Unlabelled:
Incels-a ragtag collection of young males who have rallied around their shared experience of romantic rejection-have slowly emerged as an online group of interest to researchers, no doubt as a result of several high-profile attacks. Much of this work has centered around incels' dating experiences, sexual attitudes, and online forums. However, it is possible that their moniker, short for involuntary celibate, has resulted in an overemphasis on their sexual exclusion and frustration. Recent work has identified social isolation as a key aspect of inceldom, which may help explain why incels have responded negatively to romantic rejection. The present study thus sought to examine the role of social support and loneliness in experiences of rejection in a sample of incel (n = 67) and non-incel (n = 103) men. Results indicated that incels experience more feelings of loneliness and less social supports than non-incel men. Both of these variables were associated with multiple mental and relational health issues that incels also scored more highly on. Further, incels reported using more solitary and problematic coping mechanisms. These results suggest that incels may be missing a key buffer in sheltering them from the adverse effects of romantic rejection. It also extends previous findings highlighting the importance of attachment styles in differentiating incels from non-incels, which may perpetuate feelings of isolation. Implications for how this may relate to incel discourse and clinical interventions are discussed.
Supplementary information:
The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s12144-023-04275-z.
... As is implied by the label, the incel movement has historically organized around sexual frustration (Kelly & Aunspach, 2020). Academic scholarship on inceldom points to loneliness as a central factor in the construction of this identity, suggesting that individuals are caught up in a cycle of social isolation aggravated by problematic internet use (Maxwell et al., 2020;O'Malley et al., 2020), and that anonymous online message boards and forums, including open public services, serve as outlets where self-described incels can digitally congregate and share their feelings in a sheltered manner (Castells, 1998 ;Goldsmith & Brewer, 2015;Jaki et al., 2019). The dialogue occurring in these spaces contributes toward the creation of resistance identities extending from core ideologies of masculinity (Daly & Reed, 2022) and has coalesced as negative, misogynistic, and hateful messaging (Byerly, 2020;Hoffman et al., 2020). ...
... Surveys of self-identified incels conducted on Incels.co found participants were exclusively males (100%) 2 a mostly young (82% aged 18-30), and heterosexual (93.8%), but otherwise were demographically diverse (Hintz & Baker, 2021;Jaki et al., 2019). ...
... In the Jaki et al. 2019 survey, almost 81% of respondents reported being shy during their adolescence and shared experiences of bullying and social isolation during this time. Concerns regarding physical appearance are common and act as a uniting force: incels often define themselves and their sexual frustration through their unchangeable characteristics, such as height, race, body type, physical ability, learning disabilities, and neurodivergence (Glace et al., 2021;Hintz & Baker 2021;Jaki et al., 2019;Maxwell et al., 2020;O'Malley et al., 2022;Williams & Arntfield, 2020;). High rates of mental health and psychological concerns are reported, including depression, anxiety, and suicidal ideation: over 64% reported symptoms of depression and almost 60% reported symptoms of anxiety and almost half (47.8%) reported experiencing suicidal ideation . ...
This is a knowledge synthesis review of scholarship related to the online ideology of incels. This subculture, a portmanteau of involuntary and celibate, has become synonymous with a generation of disenfranchised and sexually deprived young men who voice their frustrations on electronic media such as forums and dedicated websites. Scholarship on the incel ideology emphasizes the centrality of loneliness and isolation among adherents, which is interrelated with problematic internet behaviours.
Research evidence suggests that social isolation is growing amongst youth, leading to adverse mental health indicators including loneliness, low self-esteem, and suicidal ideation. Concurrently, scholars have observed a digital shift in communicative practice, as socialization transitions to mediated spaces. This shift accelerated through the Covid-19 pandemic and has included increased incel forum participation, and scholars have noted these forums have experienced a spike in hateful and extremist right-wing messaging.
Academic study of the incel movement is currently undergoing an emergent, exploratory phase of knowledge development. As such, significant knowledge gaps about the characteristics of the community have been identified by scholars, raising questions about pathways into inceldom, personal characteristics of adherents, and the role of loneliness in forming the identity. These questions are now amplified by the ongoing pandemic, which has driven a global increase in the use of social media platforms, connecting new audiences with the incel movement.
This project examines empirical research on engagement with the incel ideology, escalation/radicalization through the incel ideology to violence, and desistance from the ideology by asking:
1) Why do people initially become engaged with incel groups, and how does loneliness extending from the emerging asocial society influence engagement?
2) Once engaged, how does the incel ideology progress to extreme views and acts of violence/self- harm?
3) What is known about desistance from inceldom, and what practicable interventions
are possible to address engagement, extremism, violence, and self-harm?
... 1864). Jaki et al. [50] also identified social isolation as a core characteristic of inceldom. The lack of social connections may help explain why so few incels (18%) reported having pictures with others on their dating app profiles relative to non-incel men (52%), the only picture category where such a sizeable difference emerged [44]. ...
... Furthermore, incels overwhelmingly disagreed that incel groups endorse violence [28]. This may appear at odds with the volume of openly misogynistic and aggressive forum posts that have been analyzed by a number of researchers, but as Jaki et al. [50] concede, these may reflect efforts to enhance one's own status in an echo chamber rather than a desire to promote violence. Regardless, it is of obvious importance to be able to separate the wolves from the sheep as it pertains to violent and non-violent incels. ...
... Other researchers (e.g., [30,42,50]) have opted to use chronology-based inclusion criteria, capturing threads that were posted during a set time period. While advantageous, it also runs the risk of being skewed by real-world events that take place, such as the Toronto Van Attack, which resulted in a huge uptick in activity during Jaki and colleagues' [50] timeframe. ...
Purpose of Review
Incels (involuntary celibates) have recently garnered media attention for seemingly random attacks of violence. Much attention has centered around the misogynistic and violent discourse that has taken place in online incel forums as well as manifestos written by incels who have perpetrated deadly attacks. Such work overlooks the experiences and issues faced by incels themselves, the majority of which have not engaged in any violent behavior.
Recent Findings
A small number of studies have recruited incels. Results from these studies highlight the nuanced nature of the incel identity. It is also apparent that incels suffer from high levels of romantic rejection and a greater degree of depressive and anxious symptoms, insecure attachment, fear of being single, and loneliness.
Summary
Incels report significant issues pertaining to their mental, social, and relational well-being and may seek support from forums that often feature misogynistic and violent content.
... While white males (56%) represented the most important subgroup, the user base was racially diverse. A recent study using text analysis similarly reported that Incels.co was constituted of users from diverse ethnic and racial backgrounds, without any clear connection to any white supremacist agenda (Jaki et al., 2019). Statistics regarding their sexual and romantic experiences highlighted that a vast majority of Incels (77.5%) never experienced a sexual encounter, and 85% never had a sexual relationship (SergeantIncel, 2019). ...
... Nevertheless, according to a textual analysis of conversations collected on Incels.co, Incels are a more heterogeneous group than what is usually depicted by the media (Jaki et al., 2019). While about half of the sample collected by Jaki et al. (2019) posted hateful messages at one time or another, the study indicated that only a minority of users (10%) were responsible for most of the hateful content directed at women. ...
... Incels are a more heterogeneous group than what is usually depicted by the media (Jaki et al., 2019). While about half of the sample collected by Jaki et al. (2019) posted hateful messages at one time or another, the study indicated that only a minority of users (10%) were responsible for most of the hateful content directed at women. Baele et al. (2019) similarly documented the presence of an extremely active subgroup of users on incels.co, ...
Incels are defined as involuntary celibates who are part of an online community characterized by an anti-women ideology. We review research on the psychosocial characteristics of people identifying as Incels and compare their characteristics with general research on adult virginity and late sexual onset. Studies were identified through database search (Scopus, PubMed, PsycInfo and Google Scholar). Findings from 59 empirical studies were included. Incels are demographically, ethnically, and religiously diverse. Analyses of Incel forum discussions and survey responses report on psychological issues relating to negative body image, shyness, anxiety, social skill deficits, autism, bullying, sexual and romantic inexperience, loneliness, depression, and suicide. Research on adult virginity and late sexual onset report similar psychosocial characteristics and indicate feelings of being sexually “off time” relative to peers, but without a high prevalence of anti-women ideology. Future studies should focus on identifying why some sexually inexperienced adults participate in anti-women forums and identify as Incels, and if their mental health and psychosocial issues appeared before or after self-identifying as an Incel.
... Increasing internet access has enabled greater community connectivity; however, it has also increased online hate and violence that promotes online gender-based violence (GBV) against women (Hinson et al., 2018). In response to the rise of the feminist movement, several misogynist and anti-feminist groups have emerged (Jaki et al., 2019;Marwick & Caplan, 2018). One such group is involuntary celibates, also known as incels, who believe that a lack of sexual intimacy granted by women is a form of oppression against men (Lilly, 2016). ...
... Recent research on incels has focused on their online interactions (Byerly, 2020;Dynel, 2020;Jaki et al., 2019;Lilly, 2016). Physical violence conducted by incels has not been adequately connected to their online influences. ...
... Through critical discourse and semantic analysis, I evaluate the activities of an online incel forum as well as a Canadian case of incel-inspired physical violence. I expand on previous research which has looked solely at online discourse (Jaki et al., 2019;O'Donnell & Shor, 2022;O'Malley et al., 2020) or physical violence (Allely & Faccini, 2017) to inform how incel actors can use the online sphere to perpetuate harm (Regehr, 2020). I challenge how existing theoretical conceptions of terrorism and hate speech understand online gendered threats. ...
With the proliferation of the internet, emerging groups such as the men's rights movement involuntary celibate (incel) community have new ways to reproduce real-world harm and gender-based violence (GBV) against women. This study conducts a critical discourse and semantic analysis of the incels.co webpage and the Alek Minassian van attack using the Violent Extremism Risk Assessment and the Cyber Extremism Risk Assessment tool. It reveals that Canadian violent extremism frameworks minimize online GBV as a form of extremism. GBV, which extends from online to offline realities, is not captured in theoretical frameworks for terrorism and hate speech.
... In future work, we plan to delve further into forecasting by implementing temporal and propagation features (e.g., Meng et al. (2023); Dahiya et al. (2021); Lin et al. (2021); Almerekhi et al. (2020);Jaki et al. (2019)). Based on Pelicon et al. (2021), we also plan to expand language coverage, with German- (Mandl et al., 2019) and Spanishlanguage (Basile et al., 2019) hate speech datasets being two of the most prominent candidates due to their similarity to English and Italian, respectively. ...
... Preliminary candidates were selected by collecting single-and multi-word items that ranked in the top 500 for keyness, for a total of 1k analyzed items. Racism and misogyny are very characteristic elements of the language of incels (Silva et al., 2016;Ging and Siapera, 2018;Jaki et al., 2019). Therefore, we manually selected characteristic hateful terminology for this speech community by considering racist and misogynous terms that are not typically found in general language, i.e. having high keyness scores. ...
... There is research which purports incels as extremists engaging in unique and spectacular forms of misogynistic violence, focusing on instances of domestic terrorism and mass shootings (Chan, 2022;Hoffman et al., 2020). Whilst other studies (Helm et al., 2022;Heritage & Koller, 2020;Jaki et al., 2019) found that most members of incel communities appeared to be nonviolent, only a few engaged in misogynistic and toxic hate speech (however, why they would choose to participate in misogynistic spaces is unexplained). Other research contends that incel violence goes beyond such attacks and that the harm they produce does not need to be spectacular or physical to have serious effects on women (Kelly et al., 2021;Sugiura, 2021). ...
... Whilst at the surface level, incel-specific content might appear to have a diminished presence on TikTok, and despite TikTok's Community Guidelines (2023) according to which, hateful content including gendered prejudiced speech and hateful ideologies are not permitted, our findings suggest that to evade content moderation, incel content on TikTok employs covert language to present, explain and diffuse misogynistic, harmful and established incelosphere tropes and theories. This is a departure from previous incel research examining community dynamics and discourse on more secluded forums and websites, where more overt ideological expressions, including mentions of and calls to violence and dehumanising language, were identified (Baele et al., 2019;Chang, 2020;Helm et al., 2022;Jaki et al., 2019). However, our findings support previous understandings of the blackpill itself, indicating that the same incel tropes (lookism, heightpill, Chads, etc.) are utilised on both fringe media and on TikTok, but that the style in which these are communicated diverge with content on TikTok to be more implicit, insidious and palatable. ...
Incels (involuntary celibates), a subgroup of the so called ‘manosphere,’ have become an increasing security concern for policymakers, researchers, and practitioners following their association with several violent attacks. Once mostly contained on niche men’s forums, redpilled and blackpilled communities and theories are gaining prominence on mainstream social media platforms. However, whilst previous research considerably enhanced our understanding of the incel phenomenon and their presence on Reddit and secluded incel forums, incel’s presence on mainstream social media platforms is understudied and their presence on TikTok is yet to be addressed. The present paper examines the incel subculture on TikTok, through an analysis of incel accounts, videos and their respective comments, to understand the role mainstream social media platforms play in the ‘normiefication’ and normalisation of incel ideology and discourse. The findings suggest that on TikTok the expression of incel ideology takes a covert form, employing emotional appeals and pseudo-science to disseminate common incelosphere tropes. Further, we demonstrate how the process of mainstreaming incel beliefs is facilitated by their interconnectedness with wider sexism and structural misogyny. The harms generating from this association are conducive to the normalisation of blackpill beliefs and the reinforcement of misogyny, sexism and justification of rape culture.
... Scholars have explained the emergence of 'misogynistic' or 'male supremacist' terrorism with reference to group identity, masculinity threat, hostile sexism, internalized masculine honor beliefs, and processes of online radicalization, to name a few (Baele, Brace, & Coan, 2019;Jaki et al., 2019;Scaptura and Boyle, 2020;Vandello and Cohen, 2003). Others have shown that local real-world mating market 1 I focus on the incel community because it openly embraces male supremacist ideology, hatred of the feminist movement, and the perceived entitlement to sex from women (Silva, Capellan, Schmuhl, & Mills, 2021). 2 It is important to note that while there are individuals who identify as incels express so-called "blackpilled" beliefs (i.e., extreme and negative views about themselves, women, relationships, and society as a whole), not all incels share or embrace these extreme views. ...
... Many individuals who identify as incels and who are struggling with frustration in their sexual and romantic lives are not violent. This is reflected in online fora, where only a small subset of Incel forum users, about 10%, are responsible for most of the hateful content (Jaki et al., 2019). While this paper explains the emergence of the incel movement, it largely focuses on incels who express deep-seated resentment, anger, and frustration. ...
Objectives
Mass shooters, violent extremists, and terrorists, who are overwhelmingly male, exhibit misogynistic attitudes and a history of violence against women. Over the past few years, incels (“involuntary celibates”) have gathered in online communities to discuss their frustration with sexual/romantic rejection, espouse male supremacist attitudes, and justify violence against women and men who are more popular with women. Despite the link between misogyny and mass violence, and the recent emergence of online misogynistic extremism, theories and empirical research on misogynistic extremism remain scarce. This article fills this gap.
Methods
An integration of literatures pertaining to the basics of sexual selection, evolved male psychology, and aggression suggests there are three major areas that should be considered imperative in understanding the emergence of misogynistic extremism.
Results
Individual factors (e.g., low status) and social forces, such as a high degree of status inequality, female empowerment, and the ease of coordination through social media, give rise to misogynistic extremism.
Conclusions
The unique interaction between evolved male psychology, the dynamics of the sexual marketplace, and modern technologies can create an ecology in which incel beliefs can thrive and make violence attractive.
... In the publications in this section, misogynistic extremism was conceptualized as being analogous to a misogynistic incel ideology. Repeatedly, authors described misogynistic incels as adhering to an "extremist" mindset or belief system (the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), 2018; S. J. Baele et al., 2021;Hoffman et al., 2020;Jaki et al., 2019;O'Donnell & Shor, 2022;O'Malley et al., 2020;Roser et al., 2023;Rottweiler et al., 2021;Speckhard et al., 2021;Thorburn Content analysis 6 (42.86) Open-source data analysis 3 (21.23) ...
... Authors acknowledge the complicated issues surrounding monitoring online behaviors that promote misogynistic violence. Banning online communities and users from mainstream platforms may simply encourage these groups and individuals to move to less visible spaces (Jaki et al., 2019). Regehr (2022) argues for "classification" of online spaces rather than regulation or censorship, with the understanding that misogynist violence should be classified in the same manner as other forms of violent extremism. ...
In recent years, the concept of "misogynistic extremism" has emerged as a subject of interest among scholars, governments, law enforcement personnel, and the media. Yet a consistent understanding of how misogynistic extremism is defined and conceptualized has not yet emerged. Varying epistemological orientations may contribute to the current conceptual muddle of this topic, reflecting long-standing and on-going challenges with the conceptualization of its individual components. To address the potential impact of misogynistic extremism (i.e., violent attacks), a more precise understanding of what this phenomenon entails is needed. To summarize the existing knowledge base on the nature of misogynistic extremism, this scoping review analyzed publications within English-language peer-reviewed and gray literature sources. Seven electronic databases and citation indexes were systematically searched using the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses extension for scoping reviews (PRISMA-ScR) checklist and charted using the 2020 PRISMA flow diagram. Inclusion criteria included English peer-reviewed articles and relevant gray literature publications, which contained the term "misogynistic extremism" and other closely related terms. No date restrictions were imposed. The search strategy initially yielded 475 publications. After exclusion of ineligible articles, 40 publications remained for synthesis. We found that misogynistic extremism is most frequently conceptualized in the context of misogynistic incels, male supremacism, far-right extremism, terrorism, and the black pill ideology. Policy recommendations include increased education among law enforcement and Countering and Preventing Violent Extremism experts on male supremacist violence and encouraging legal and educational mechanisms to bolster gender equality. Violence stemming from misogynistic worldviews must be addressed by directly acknowledging and challenging socially embedded systems of oppression such as white supremacy and cisheteropatriarchy.
... Scholars have explained the emergence of 'misogynistic' or 'male supremacist' terrorism with reference to group identity, masculinity threat, hostile sexism, internalized masculine honor beliefs, and processes of online radicalization, to name a few (Baele, Brace, & Coan, 2019;Jaki et al., 2019;Scaptura and Boyle, 2020;Vandello and Cohen, 2003). Others have shown that local real-world mating market 1 I focus on the incel community because it openly embraces male supremacist ideology, hatred of the feminist movement, and the perceived entitlement to sex from women (Silva, Capellan, Schmuhl, & Mills, 2021). 2 It is important to note that while there are individuals who identify as incels express so-called "blackpilled" beliefs (i.e., extreme and negative views about themselves, women, relationships, and society as a whole), not all incels share or embrace these extreme views. ...
... Many individuals who identify as incels and who are struggling with frustration in their sexual and romantic lives are not violent. This is reflected in online fora, where only a small subset of Incel forum users, about 10%, are responsible for most of the hateful content (Jaki et al., 2019). While this paper explains the emergence of the incel movement, it largely focuses on incels who express deep-seated resentment, anger, and frustration. ...
Mass shooters, violent extremists, and terrorists, who are overwhelmingly male, exhibit misogynistic attitudes and a history of violence against women. Over the past few years, incels (“involuntary celibates”) have gathered in online communities to discuss their frustration with sexual/romantic rejection, espouse male supremacist attitudes, and justify violence against women and men who are more popular with women. Despite the link between misogyny and mass violence, and the recent emergence of online misogynistic extremism, theories and empirical research on misogynistic extremism remain scarce. I posit that the unique interaction between evolved male psychology, the dynamics of the sexual marketplace, and modern technologies create an ecology in which incel beliefs can thrive and make violence attractive. I show how individual factors, particularly low status, and social forces, such as a high degree of status inequality, female empowerment, and the ease of coordination through social media, give rise to misogynistic extremism.
... Incels, however, stand out because their ideology, the blackpill philosophy, adopts an even more nihilistic and sexist worldview (Baele, Brace, and Coan 2019). Self-proclaimed incels occupy the "incelosphere" of isolated men blaming their involuntary lack of sexual and romantic success on feminism and women (Jaki et al. 2019;Lowles 2019). Their online subculture propagating misogynistic and extremist ideology has been criticized for fostering male supremacy and racism, violence and a culture of martyrdom, and even domestic terrorism (Larkin 2018;Lavin 2020;Witt 2020). ...
... Mental illness seems to be prevalent: "70% claimed to suffer from depression, while over a quarter selfidentified as autistic" (Hoffman, Ware, and Shapiro 2020: 568). The incel demographic would seem to be heterosexual males between the ages of 21 and 33, and appear somewhat ethnically diverse, which contradicts the idea that incels are mainly white, as is often reported by the media (Jaki et al. 2019). However, although members vary in race and ethnicity, the incel subculture espouses ideas and preferences of heteronormativity "rooted in biological positivism and white supremacy" (Lindsay 2022: 217). ...
This article explores the boundary work of incels (involuntary celibates), to counter negative media coverage and online ridicule. Attempting to claim rational status, incels have created alternative information channels that reframe their situation of involuntary celibacy as a legitimate life circumstance. I examine the symbolic boundaries within the incel subculture, using the Incel Wikipedia page as a specialized encyclopedia for their online milieu. After describing the incel worldview and subcultural identity, I analyze how incels engage in boundary work to differentiate and solidify their status – categorizing themselves and other people. The article draws on theories of narrative and cultural criminology to present how incels negotiate their identity by establishing symbolic boundaries that exclude out-groups such as women, sexually successful men, and mainstream society. It concludes by considering how boundaries within the in-group are based on degrees of inceldom, gender, and violent actors. As a site of resistance, the boundary work of the incel wiki reveals how the social incel identity is formed and given meaning by contrast to symbolic others. I argue that narrative and cultural criminology can help us unravel the online ecosystem by analyzing the negotiation of external and internal subcultural boundaries.
... Incels are known for having negative self-views, mental health concerns, and other personality concerns (Aulia & Rosida, 2022;Bieselt, 2020;Ciocca et al., 2022;Costello et al., 2022;Grunau, 2020;Jaki et al., 2019;Justin et al., 2022;Sparks et al., 2022b;Stijelja, 2021;Stijelja & Mishara, 2022). The present study found continued evidence of these attributes, but it also found evidence of incels wanting to positively grow as individuals. ...
Involuntary celibates, known as incels, have gained media attention due to violent incidents involving members of their community. Previous studies have examined their violent norms, radical ideologies, and views on women, but none have explored why incels may disengage from the online incel community. This study utilizes a media content analysis framework to analyze data from an open-access forum (n = 237) and understand the values of former incels. Inductive media content analysis reveals four main themes: (1) leaving inceldom, (2) social interactions of incels, (3) self-conception of incels, and (4) the incel philosophy. These findings shed light on the dynamics within the incel community for those who abandon the incel lifestyle. Future research should investigate the reasons for incels leaving their community and explore strategies to support them in this process. Intervention approaches could be developed to assist incels during their transition.
... Incels use the internet, specifically social media sites such as Reddit and 4chan, as a way to organize campaigns against women and those men who possess the privileges of hegemonic masculinity (Ging, 2019). The demographic composition of Incel communities has not been systematically measured (Jaki et al., 2019). Instead, Incel forums and websites have distributed their own surveys to measure demographic characteristics of their members. ...
In a gender-segregated digital space known as the Manosphere, a group of men calling themselves “Incels,” or involuntary celibates, express feelings of hostility and hatred towards women. Incels hold a low position on a masculine hierarchy where the men who hold the most power in society are those who have access to women’s emotional and sexual services. Incels are characterized by feelings of entitlement to women’s services and aggrievement by their inability to access them. As a result, they often appear to fantasize about or engage in acts of violence to compensate for their lack of masculine privilege. However, there are men who try to escape these harmful ideologies and leave the Incel community altogether. In this study, I analyze 130
Reddit threads from a community of men attempting to leave the Incel community. This case study permits the examination of the ways low-status men challenge and/or reinforce the masculine hierarchy. Findings demonstrate the pervasive power of the masculine hierarchy. Aside from a few exceptions, men who were presumably attempting to leave the Incel community embraced their low status on the masculine hierarchy and accepted the inevitability
of that hierarchy. Their reluctance to challenge the masculine hierarchy suggests they recognize that this hierarchy both justifies their subjugation under more privileged men and their power over women. In other words, for these men, the masculine hierarchy is simultaneously a prison and a bastion of masculine privilege.
... Cheng et al. [10] predict accounts that will engage in antisocial behavior for popular websites and detect antisocial behavior in comments, while Chelmis and Yao [8] predict if a hateful comment on an Instagram post will be followed by further hateful comments. Jaki et al. [24] focus on the Incels.me forum and propose a deep learning classifier that analyzes the users' language and detects instances of misogyny, homophobia, and racism. ...
Alas, coordinated hate attacks, or raids, are becoming increasingly common online. In a nutshell, these are perpetrated by a group of aggressors who organize and coordinate operations on a platform (e.g., 4chan) to target victims on another community (e.g., YouTube). In this paper, we focus on attributing raids to their source community, paving the way for moderation approaches that take the context (and potentially the motivation) of an attack into consideration. We present TUBERAIDER, an attribution system achieving over 75% accuracy in detecting and attributing coordinated hate attacks on YouTube videos. We instantiate it using links to YouTube videos shared on 4chan's /pol/ board, r/The_Donald, and 16 Incels-related subreddits. We use a peak detector to identify a rise in the comment activity of a YouTube video, which signals that an attack may be occurring. We then train a machine learning classifier based on the community language (i.e., TF-IDF scores of relevant keywords) to perform the attribution. We test TUBERAIDER in the wild and present a few case studies of actual aggression attacks identified by it to showcase its effectiveness.
... Much prior work on the manosphere has been qualitative, such as ethnographies (Lin, 2017;Lumsden, 2019;Van Valkenburgh, 2021). There have been a few quantitative analyses of their language, usually focusing on phrase and word frequencies in a few communities (Farrell et al., 2019;Gothard et al., 2021;LaViolette and Hogan, 2019;Jaki et al., 2019). As an example involving word vectors, Farrell et al. (2020) uses static embeddings identify the meanings of incels' neologisms by inspecting words' nearest neighbors. ...
... 35 ISSN: 2363-9849 2017, and thus give little indication of offline threat. Along the same lines, Jaki et al. (2019) found that only a small subset of Incel (involuntarily celibate) forum users were responsible for most of the hateful content. A study analyzing posts in Reddit found that only 3 percent of users posted 33 percent of all hateful content (Kumar et al., 2023). ...
The online following of conspiracy theory believers known as QAnon has recently come into focus of U.S. government agencies and terrorism scholars, raising questions about the risk of violence it poses. To address these questions, as well as to triangulate existing research on QAnon’s threat, the present study compared survey responses about actual radical intention and activist intention scores of QAnon supporters (n = 113) and non-QAnon participants (n = 287), relative to QAnon’s radicalization as perceived by non-QAnon participants. Actual radical intention scores for QAnon supporters were significantly lower than the perceptions of QAnon radical intentions, and were not significantly different than the actual radical intention scores for non-QAnon participants. Activist intention scores were lowest among QAnon supporters, followed by non-QAnon supporters, and then by perceptions of QAnon activist intentions. The implications of the results for public policy are discussed.
... Incels abide by "The Black Pill," the belief that unattractive men would be doomed to romantic loneliness and unhappiness. Previous work has studied the community links with other masculinist communities , as well as its relationship with terrorist attacks (Hoffman, Ware, and Shapiro 2020) and the production of misogynistic content online (Jaki et al. 2019). ...
Online platforms face pressure to keep their communities civil and respectful. Thus, banning problematic online communities from mainstream platforms is often met with enthusiastic public reactions. However, this policy can lead users to migrate to alternative fringe platforms with lower moderation standards and may reinforce antisocial behaviors. As users of these communities often remain co-active across mainstream and fringe platforms, antisocial behaviors may spill over onto the mainstream platform. We study this possible spillover by analyzing 70,000 users from three banned communities that migrated to fringe platforms: r/The_Donald, r/GenderCritical, and r/Incels. Using a difference-in-differences design, we contrast co-active users with matched counterparts to estimate the causal effect of fringe platform participation on users' antisocial behavior on Reddit. Our results show that participating in the fringe communities increases users' toxicity on Reddit (as measured by Perspective API) and involvement with subreddits similar to the banned community---which often also breach platform norms. The effect intensifies with time and exposure to the fringe platform. In short, we find evidence for a spillover of antisocial behavior from fringe platforms onto Reddit via co-participation.
... Incels are part of a larger manosphere, a group of male-oriented websites that share the belief that men face systemic discrimination (Bates, 2021;Ging, 2019;Marwick and Caplan, 2018;Van Valkenburgh, 2021). Incels and similar communities create affordances (Boyd, 2010) for the villainization of feminism, cyberhate, and networked misogyny (Halpin, 2022;Halpin and Richard, 2021;Jaki et al., 2019;Jane, 2018;Jones et al., 2020;Marwick and Caplan, 2018;Moloney and Love, 2019;O'Donnell and Shor, 2022;O'Malley et al., 2020;Pelzer et al., 2021;Preston et al., 2021). Building on such research, we use computational methods to demonstrate the ubiquity of misogyny on incels.is. ...
This article uses computational data and social science theories to analyze the misogynistic discourse of the involuntary celibate (“incel”) community. We analyzed every comment ( N = 3,686,110) produced over 42 months on a popular incel discussion board and found that nearly all active participants use misogynistic terms. Participants used misogynistic terms nearly one million times and at a rate 2.4 times greater than their use of neutral terms for women. The majority of participants’ use of misogynistic terms does not increase or decrease with post frequency, suggesting that members arrive (rather than become) misogynistic. We discuss these findings in relation to theories of intersectionality, masculinity, and sexism. We likewise discuss potential policies for mitigating incel misogyny and similar online discourse.
... Additionally, inceldom does appear to be a primarily Western phenomenon, with a key aspect of their ideology referring specifically to the perceived negative effects that gender equality in Western society has had on women's dating preferences (Ging, 2019). Thus, the present sample is likely reflective of the ethnic and national diversity of the larger incel community (Jaki et al., 2019;Stijelja & Mishara, 2023), but it would nevertheless be useful for future research to focus on the experiences and perspectives of non-White and non-Western incels. ...
... forum similarly observed sets of figurative references for gendered social actors, like rice-bitches, cucks, or mongrels, intersecting with a 'scientifisation' of notions of higher and lower categories of both men and women. Elsewhere, Jaki et al. (2019) identified a range of misogynist and otherwise degrading terms, including metaphors, like femoids, manlets and vermin, pertaining to the construction of ingroups and out-groups in social actor representation. This is also echoed by the work of Prażmo (2020) on femoid as a dehumanising metaphor. ...
Incels, or involuntary celibates, are a community of typically heterosexual young men who wish to, but do not, have sexual and romantic relationships with women. As a community, they have previously been characterised by their hatred for women and violent acts against members of society who they believe prevent them from having relations with women. In this paper, we highlight the pervasiveness of metaphor in incel communication, so far unaddressed in the budding studies of incel language. Specifically, using a sample of circa 22,500 words from the banned incel Reddit forum r/Braincels, we focus on how members of this community use metaphoric expressions to dehumanise gendered social actors, both as individuals and as groups. We discuss our findings against the backdrop of metaphor approaches to language, gender, and sexuality, and the relevance of dehumanising metaphorical rhetoric for online misogynist groups.
... and incels.me [Baele et al. 2019;Jaki et al. 2019]) or/and on what Ging (2019) calls "flashpoint events" (such as "#gamergate" or "The Fappening", see Massanari 2017). 2. Discussions amongst the community appear to have become increasingly political and extremist, which is indicative of some form of behavioural dynamics in relation to the internal ideological contagion of the most extreme ideas. ...
In recent years, male supremacist and anti-women formations have become increasingly prevalent online. In particular, considerable attention has been focused on the incel (involuntary celibate) community due to a number of high-profile mass killings in the United States, Canada and, more recently, the UK. Incel ideology is a misogynistic formation, whose male proponents blame women for their lack of sexual activity. It operates in the broader virtual space of the manosphere, a loose conglomerate of online communities spread across various digital platforms, which are united in their antipathy toward feminism, their belief in evolutionary psychology and their adherence to the Red Pill (a process of enlightenment, whereby one comes to understand the world as a liberal feminist conspiracy that disadvantages men). This research tracks the dynamic pathways by which incel ideology spreads within and across online communities, digital platforms and geographical spaces, with a view to better understanding processes of radicalization, including ‘algorithmic radicalization.’ We also explore the dynamic interplay between incel and alt-right rhetoric. Understanding the contagion dynamics of extremist ideas - how such ideas circulate, gain new audiences, and morph into new ones - is crucial to researchers, educators, platforms and security practitioners: However, theoretical and practical understanding of the online contagion of extremist ideologies is lacking. It is only by understanding these ‘pilling pipelines’ (Ging and Murphy 2021) that effective interventions can be developed, whether educational, technological, legal or platform-governance-related.
... Their study utilized mixed-methods research and a sophisticated deep learning system to trawl masses of Incel posts and conclude that only around 3% of the material they surveyed exhibited explicitly racist language. 71 While the majority of Incels are white, there is widespread diversity within the community. Clearly, some on Incel discussion forums articulate some of the racist ideas associated with far-right groups, but it is difficult to get a sense of how prevalent these ideas are within the community simply by observing forum posts. ...
In recent years research on the involuntarily celibate or “Incel” community has contributed a small but significant stock of knowledge about toxic varieties of extreme misogyny being shared on lightly regulated online communication boards. Simultaneously, we have witnessed the potential for Incel ideas to find expression in disturbing outbursts of extremist violence. This paper uses existing research to consider what we know and what we need to find out about this milieu if we are to further our knowledge and understanding. Ultimately, we highlight five key questions that need to be investigated more thoroughly and call for a wider range of methodological approaches in this endeavor. In particular, we argue that there is a need to build stronger connections with members of the Incel community in order to pursue a better-crafted body of research. While this is challenging, it is necessary if we are to gain a sense of how much support there is in Incel communities for violence, the role of pornography within the community, the key dimensions of Femcel ideology, the connections between Incel ideology and extreme right-wing thinking, and the measures that might aid deradicalization once an individual has adopted ideas related to extremist misogyny. Ultimately, we argue that while certain pieces of research are leading the way in contributing fresh thinking and innovative methodological approaches, there is much work to be done to develop our understanding in these areas of enquiry.
... For these content analyses, researchers have used programs like Voyant and NVivo to conduct automated linguistic analyses while others have used hand-coding. For example, Jaki and colleagues (Jaki et al. 2019) used the former approach to conduct a mixed-methods analysis using quantitative natural language processing (NLP) to count occurrences with a qualitative analysis of the collected data. They found instances of hate speech, racism, and misogyny, although they only identified five percent of the messages in their extensive dataset that contained one or more of the offensive words from the list they created, with the most common being misogynistic slurs. ...
Research about involuntary celibates, or incels, has often relied on indirect texts such as internet forums and discussions as a source of data for qualitative analysis. Using direct qualitative data from interviews with incels (N = 14), this paper examines their beliefs about negative online behaviors such as shit-posting. From the data, we identified various themes, and participants stated that they may view this behavior as: 1.) one that is not specifically isolated to incels (or only a small fraction of the incel population); 2.) for attention; or 3.) a reflection of some truth or deeper emotion. Other explanations, however, suggested that shit-posting is: 4.) just a joke or not serious; 5.) annoying or a negative representation of all incels; or 6.) false flags by others outside of the community. Researchers in online behavior—and incel researchers in particular – should give special attention to the reasons why users may engage in reprehensible or vile speech and the rewards that such behaviors offer. Attention to the nuance and purpose of online behaviors can provide additional context for the interpretation and application of existing and future incel research, and it can inform policies and practices to make internet spaces less harmful.
... Virtual image sensing involves an electronic device that converts an optical image into an electronic signal. It is used in digital cameras and imaging devices to convert the light received by the camera or imaging device lens into a digital image [31]. ...
The rapid increase in Internet technology and machine-learning devices has opened up new avenues for online healthcare systems. Sometimes, getting medical assistance or healthcare advice online is easier to understand than getting it in person. For mild symptoms, people frequently feel reluctant to visit the hospital or a doctor; instead, they express their questions on numerous healthcare forums. However, predictions may not always be accurate, and there is no assurance that users will always receive a reply to their posts. In addition, some posts are made up, which can misdirect the patient. To address these issues, automatic online prediction (OAP) is proposed. OAP clarifies the idea of employing machine learning to predict the common attributes of disease using Never-Ending Image Learner with an intelligent analysis of disease factors. Never-Ending Image Learner predicts disease factors by selecting from finite data images with minimum structural risk and efficiently predicting efficient real-time images via machine-learning-enabled M-theory. The proposed multi-access edge computing platform works with the machine-learning-assisted automatic prediction from multiple images using multiple-instance learning. Using a Never-Ending Image Learner based on Machine Learning, common disease attributes may be predicted online automatically. This method has deeper storage of images, and their data are stored per the isotropic positioning. The proposed method was compared with existing approaches, such as Multiple-Instance Learning for automated image indexing and hyper-spectrum image classification. Regarding the machine learning of multiple images with the application of isotropic positioning, the operating efficiency is improved, and the results are predicted with better accuracy. In this paper, machine-learning performance metrics for online automatic prediction tools are compiled and compared, and through this survey, the proposed method is shown to achieve higher accuracy, proving its efficiency compared to the existing methods.
... The ever-improving fields of artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language processing (NLP) have leveraged the large amount of data being generated now, as more researchers try to understand and monitor the sentiment of users towards certain topics and events [5]. There is a need to develop and improve the quality of algorithms that will automatically detect and report these abusive contents, which most times are directed towards women [6], being aware that we cannot ascertain 100% the content of the message conveyed when automatic techniques are deployed in gaining inferences about the author of a post [7]. ...
There has been enormous growth in the volume of user content posted to social media such as Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube. A major challenge for this media is to monitor and prevent the posting of abusive and misogynistic user content, be this bullying content or other types of abusive text content, especially against women. Research work in this area is ongoing. A particular gap, however, is the detection of content across multiple languages especially vernacular, as the tendency is to focus on major languages such as English and Spanish. This research seeks to address both the detection of mis-ogynistic content and the challenge of doing this while taking account of multiple languages. The research will also investigate the relationship between mi-sogyny and other abusive language scenarios in the context earlier stated. Da-taset for this research was gotten from social media platforms through their Application Programming Interface (API). The techniques deployed include traditional machine learning algorithms used in building automated modules for categorizing content, text mining for the parsing and analysis of text, and deep learning for learning transfer across different languages/datasets. The proposed conceptual model will be a huge step towards a more ambitious goal of creating novel mechanisms to detect abusive and misogynistic behaviors on social media platforms.
... Incels are part of a larger manosphere, a group of male-oriented websites that share the belief that men face systemic discrimination (Bates, 2021;Ging, 2019;Marwick and Caplan, 2018;Van Valkenburgh, 2021). Incels and similar communities create affordances (Boyd, 2010) for the villainization of feminism, cyberhate, and networked misogyny (Halpin, 2022;Halpin and Richard, 2021;Jaki et al., 2019;Jane, 2018;Jones et al., 2020;Marwick and Caplan, 2018;Moloney and Love, 2019;O'Donnell and Shor, 2022;O'Malley et al., 2020;Pelzer et al., 2021;Preston et al., 2021). Building on such research, we use computational methods to demonstrate the ubiquity of misogyny on incels.is. ...
This paper uses computational data and social science theories to analyze the misogynistic discourse of the involuntary celibate (“incel”) community. We analyzed every comment (N=3,686,110) produced over 42 months on a popular incel discussion board and found that nearly all active participants use misogynistic terms. Participants used misogynistic terms (e.g., “foid,” “roastie”) nearly one million times and at a rate 2.4 times greater than their use of neutral terms for women (e.g., “woman”). The majority of participants’ use of misogynistic terms does not increase or decrease with post frequency, suggesting that members arrive (rather than become) misogynistic. We discuss these findings in relation to theories of masculinity, sexism, and intersectionality. We likewise discuss potential policies for mitigating incel misogyny and similar forms of online discourse.
... Radicalizing individual generate a sense of in-group loyalty and positive outlook towards in-group while also being hostile and negative to the outgroup. Research into the Manosphere has shown that it's members have a shared identity and have constructed a major out-group (women) as the causes for their grievances [65] and targets for violence [66]. ...
The algorithms and the interactions facilitated by online platforms have been used by radical groups to recruit vulnerable individuals to their cause. This has resulted in the sharp growth of violent events and deteriorating online discourse. The Manosphere, a collection of radical anti-feminist communities, is one such group that has attracted attention due to its rapid growth and increasingly violent real-world outbursts. In this paper, we examine the social engagements between Reddit users who have participated in feminist discourse and the Manosphere communities on Reddit to understand the process of development of traits associated with the adoption of extremist ideologies. By using existing research on the psychology of radicalization we track how specific types of social engagement with the Manosphere influence the development of traits associated with radicalization. Our findings show that: (1) participation, even by the simple act of joining the Manosphere, has a significant influence on the language and outlook traits of a user, (2) Manosphere elites are extremely effective propagators of radical traits and cause their increase even outside the Manosphere, and (3) community perception can heavily influence a user's behavior. Finally, we examine how our findings can help draft community and platform moderation policies to help mitigate the problem of online radicalization.
... Having a distinct movement that is primarily defined by misogyny is [fairly] novel." 16 Jaki et al. 17 and Beale et al. 18 have shown that users on Incel forums deem the use of violence against women as recent both acceptable and desirable and O'Donnell and Shor 19 connected this violence to nascent attempts by Incels to pursue policy change. Regardless, scholarship on Incels generally questions the political nature of the movement. ...
A new group of socio-political actors has emerged from the depths of the internet. Thriving in the online Manosphere, the involuntary celibates, or “Incels,” are men who feel they have been victimized by feminism. Initially just another misogynist social group online, this article argues that Incels are moving beyond social commentary to become a political movement. This article demonstrates that Incels have begun to craft a particularly violent political ideology drawing on a unique form of misogyny rooted in the construction of a counternarrative to hegemonic masculinity. Using critical narrative analysis, this article assesses the discourse and narratives used by the Incels to create their unique worldview and identifies core components of their emerging political ideology to understand how this group may justify the use of political violence as part of their political movement.
... Much prior work on the manosphere has been qualitative, such as ethnographies (Lin, 2017;Lumsden, 2019;Van Valkenburgh, 2021). There have been a few quantitative analyses of their language, usually focusing on phrase and word frequencies in a few communities (Farrell et al., 2019;Gothard et al., 2021;LaViolette and Hogan, 2019;Jaki et al., 2019). As an example involving word vectors, Farrell et al. (2020) uses static embeddings identify the meanings of incels' neologisms by inspecting words' nearest neighbors. ...
A common paradigm for identifying semantic differences across social and temporal contexts is the use of static word embeddings and their distances. In particular, past work has compared embeddings against "semantic axes" that represent two opposing concepts. We extend this paradigm to BERT embeddings, and construct contextualized axes that mitigate the pitfall where antonyms have neighboring representations. We validate and demonstrate these axes on two people-centric datasets: occupations from Wikipedia, and multi-platform discussions in extremist, men's communities over fourteen years. In both studies, contextualized semantic axes can characterize differences among instances of the same word type. In the latter study, we show that references to women and the contexts around them have become more detestable over time.
Misogynist incels have been at the fore of academic, professional and mainstream discussions in recent years. Drawing on a systematic review of 47 studies, as well as my own experience with researching current misogynist and exit-curious incels, this paper explores the strengths and weaknesses of the contemporary incel-focused literature. It summarises and critiques the foundational knowledge that underpins our understanding of the current incel community, conceptualised into themes of incels as oppressors, incels as oppressed and incels as threat. Importantly, this paper interrogates the usefulness of our working definition of the term ‘incel’, calling for greater specificity in the language we use to define, theorise and explain the subsets of the incel community under study. In line with a call for more precise language in empirical works, I explore several areas for future research that will help broaden our understanding of the complexities and contradictions within the broader incelosphere.
Involuntary celibates (“incels”) refers to a group consisting mostly of heterosexual men that exists predominantly in online spaces. These men are united by a belief that they are victimized by a postfeminist society, leading to an inability to engage in sexual intimacy with women. Recent acts of mass violence have been linked to self-identified incels, leading to an increased need for awareness of incel worldviews, argot, and demographics among psychiatrists. Limited research exists to describe this heterogenous group, with existing data suggesting higher rates of depression, anxiety, and suicidal ideation within the demographic. This column reviews the incel worldview, existing literature, how to identify an individual with incel beliefs based on vocabulary and internet usage, and treatment modalities.
O presente trabalho tem como objetivo oferecer uma análise psicológica de caso segundo a perspectiva analítica sobre o fenômeno de ódio coletivo ao feminino, encapsulado em uma subcultura conhecida como incel (termo em inglês significando involuntary celibate), algo de crescente relevância no cenário virtual e físico mundial evidenciado por episódios como tiroteios em massa, ataques - virtuais e pessoais - com um propósito definido e caracterizado por valores ideológicos, psicológicos e sociais relativamente coesos. Para tal, foi realizada
revisão de literatura buscando produção acadêmica em bancos de dados virtuais, que serviu como uma base para traçar um panorama da situação das agressões virtuais existentes nos últimos dez anos e sua cumulação em ataques à pessoas físicas, como no caso a ser trabalhado, do ataque em Suzano, em 2019, a partir do qual foram explorados os motivos desse ataque e suas concepções teóricas usando a teoria Analítica Junguiana para se analisar simbolicamente a dinâmica dos complexos presentes nesse evento. Nessa exploração, foi constatado que uma possível explicação para o fenômeno esteja na relação do conflito interno entre um ego enrijecido pelo pensamento misógino e um desejo inconsciente de se buscar o feminino e uma mobilização sócio-política que leva à radicalização e atos de violência extrema.
Zusammenfassung
Parallel zum Anstieg von Hate Speech in sozialen Netzwerken und anderen Online-Medien ist auch das Interesse an diesem Thema in verschiedenen Fachdisziplinen gewachsen, so dass sich mittlerweile ein eigenes Forschungsfeld etabliert hat, zu dem die unterschiedlichen Disziplinen ihren Beitrag leisten. In diesem Artikel soll der Beitrag der Linguistik zur Hate-Speech-Forschung erläutert werden, indem ein Überblick über die in diesem Feld existierende Forschung gegeben wird. Der Fokus liegt hierbei auf Untersuchungen, die dazu dienen, die sprachlichen Charakteristika von Hate Speech zu beschreiben, und weniger, diese automatisiert zu erkennen. Neben einer Zusammenfassung des Forschungsstandes ist es diesem Beitrag jedoch auch ein Anliegen, die in den verschiedenen Untersuchungen erarbeiteten Charakteristika von Hate Speech exemplarisch vorzustellen. Hierfür werden illustrierend Twitter-Daten aus drei Sprachen (Englisch, Deutsch, Niederländisch) verwendet. Der Beitrag bemüht sich jedoch auch zu zeigen, dass eine rein sprachbasierte Analyse von Hate Speech um eine multimodale Komponente erweitert werden muss, um der kommunikativen Realität der sozialen Medien ausreichend Rechnung zu tragen.
Incels (involuntary celibates) have advocated for and even enacted violence against women. We explored two mechanisms that may underly incels' actions: identity fusion and self-verification. Study 1 (n = 155) revealed stronger identity fusion (deep alignment) with the ingroup among men active in online incel communities compared to men active in other male-dominated groups. Study 2 (n = 113) showed that feeling self-verified by other incels predicted fusion with incels; fusion, in turn, predicted endorsement of past and future violence toward women. Study 3 (n = 283; preregistered) replicated the indirect effects from Study 2 and extended them by linking fusion to online harassment of women. All indirect effects were particularly strong among self-identified incels high in narcissism. We discuss the synergistic links between self-verification and identity fusion in fostering extreme behaviors and identify directions for future research.
Incels represent a subculture born on the Internet and unified by their inability to establish and maintain sexual relationships with women. When new members enter, they are placed at the beginning of a subcultural process that uses their shared experience to introduce them to increasingly radical viewpoints. In order to analyze Incel subculture, this research uses a purposive sample of on-line discussion boards of Incel culture and traces the subcultural process of radicalization. Findings suggest that Incels use a series of increasingly radical “pills” to denote their position within the subculture and move new and prospective members along an ever increasing pipeline of extremism resulting in both advocating for and approval of violence.
The loose network of anti-feminist men’s websites and social media communities known as the “manosphere” is receiving increasing attention in academia and the mainstream media. However, research into this phenomenon brings notable challenges. For example, because some manosphere communities are known for hostility or even harassment towards women, common guidance for social media research such as gaining informed consent and sharing results with the community may not be viable. In this article, I reflect on some of the major methodological and ethical challenges I have faced during the course of my PhD research into the manosphere and the ways in which my positionality as a female, feminist linguist has impacted my work. I discuss the discourse-historical approach to critical discourse studies and argue that it is a valuable, useful framework for a study of online misogyny due to its principles of triangulation and interdisciplinarity, and its empowerment of the researcher to take a critical, even feminist, stance on controversial issues.
The manosphere is a fragmented group of digital communities promoting misogynist discourses. The main focus of these communities is the construction of man’s identity with reactionary gender traits and roles based on the critique of feminism and its transformative influence on society, and a victimization storytelling. Various ramifications, or subcultures, can be identified within the discursive and ideological foundations that configure these channels of reactionary masculinity, especially new emerging communities labelled Red Pill, incels and PUA, which have gathered scholars’ and media attention. However, this very diversity seems to introduce some confusion, becoming a fuzzy convergence of reactionary and antifeminist statements and attitudes. Thus, this calls for a necessary systematic clarification of the characteristics they feature. With this purpose, this article examines the traits of masculine identities found in the digital manosphere subcultures, classifying them according to the discourses they promote, the philosophy of life they adopt, the organization they have, the performance they exhibit, and the type of violence they perform against women.
Large-scale linguistic analyses are increasingly applied to the study of extremism, terrorism, and other threats of violence. At the same time, practitioners working in the field of counterterrorism and security are confronted with large-scale linguistic data, and may benefit from computational methods. This article highlights the challenges and opportunities associated with applying computational linguistics in the domain of threat assessment. Four current issues are identified, namely (1) the data problem, (2) the utopia of predicting violence, (3) the base rate fallacy, and (4) the danger of closed-sourced tools. These challenges are translated into a checklist of questions that should be asked by policymakers and practitioners who (intend to) make use of tools that leverage computational linguistics for threat assessment. The ‘VISOR-P’ checklist can be used to evaluate such tools through their Validity, Indicators, Scientific Quality, Openness, Relevance and Performance. Finally, some suggestions are outlined for the furtherance of the computational linguistic threat assessment field.
As marriage is central to cultural understandings of gender and sexuality, linguists have examined talk about marriage, the language of wedding invitations, and the language of ceremonies themselves. It is also common for the rite of marriage to align with changes in language use, such as linguistic exogamy or mother-in-law language. This chapter considers how such changes inflect gendered identity. The discussion outlines the ways in which the felicity of a marriage pronouncement as a performative is often independent of the actual words spoken as vows and examines the language associated with changes to marriage, including same-sex marriage. The review suggests that linguists pay closer attention to how language defines what is outside of marriage and how such definitions create inequalities by marginalizing and valorizing individuals through the institution itself.
This study examines conversations developed in the virtual public sphere to identify if a user’s gender affects the presence of incivility in news comment sections. By relying on a mixed-method analysis of 1,961 news comments published on a Chilean news website, we observed the extent to which uncivil speech and gendered symbolic violence traits are used to reinforce stereotypes against women. Our results show men are more likely to post uncivil comments, while women use fewer profanities, insulting language, and stereotypes. One of our most intriguing findings is that men tend to receive more uncivil replies that women, mostly because they are more likely to initiate uncivil conversations, which in turn triggers uncivil replies and increases the odds of uncivil comment threads. As such, news outlets looking for enhancing healthy discussions should encourage greater participation of female users in their comment sections. We also identified the presence of hegemonic masculinity discourses referring to women and their gender roles in society. These findings reveal that comment sections mirror a social hierarchy in which men have a position of power that allows them to be more uncivil. Consequently, the virtual public sphere replicates the dominant-subordinate relationships described by previous research.
Across time, in a variety of forms and spaces -from homes and workplaces to
digital domains of social media- women have become victims of male dominance.
So also are the other vulnerable sections that suffer multi-layered abuse, and
endure sexual harassment in social media. Yet, this phenomenon is insufficiently
explored. Therefore, this article argues that social media spaces have become
domains for sexual harassment and subjugation of women. This article examines
gender-trolling on Twitter as a form of sexual violence against women. Employing
qualitative analyses of the Twitter conversations on Indian journalists, namely
Barkha Dutt, Sagarika Ghose, and Rana Ayyub, it exposes the nature and form of
sexual violence against women on the micro-blogging space, and argues that
social media platforms constitute convenient havens of harassment against
assertive women
Keywords: Twitter, social media, women journalists, sexual harassment, misogyny
Incel, shorthand for 'involuntarily celibate, ' is a violent political ideology based on a new wave of misogyny and white supremacy. These (mostly) young men are frustrated at a world they see as denying them power and sexual control over women's bodies. In their eyes, they are victims of oppressive feminism, an ideology which must be overthrown, often through violence. Incel ideology presents a mythologized view that prior to the sexual revolution in the '60s, every man had access to a female partner; subsequent to the women's empowerment movement, fewer and fewer men have access to a partner. They frame this shift as a profound injustice to men who cannot find a sexual partner, suggesting that society has failed to give men what they are entitled to (access to women's bodies) and that the only recourse is violent insurrection.
The rampage of Elliot Rodger adjacent to the campus of the University of California, Santa Barbara in May 2014 is used as a case study of how a sexually and socially frustrated and isolated young man from a highly privileged background became a rampage shooter. He followed a route typical of post‐Columbine rampage shooters by socializing himself to the role of rampager through reading books that informed and reinforced his worldview, playing first‐person shooter online games, visiting hate group websites, purchasing weaponry, and planning his rampage. The social‐political perspective is advanced as an alternative to the more popular mental illness approach because it addresses three fundamental questions related to rampage shootings: Why are nearly all rampage shooters male? Why are they mostly American? And why have they emerged as a serious social problem since the 1980s? The chapter ends with suggestions about what needs to be done to reduce the number of rampage shootings in the United States.
We have developed a system that automatically detects online jihadist hate speech with over 80% accuracy, by using techniques from Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning. The system is trained on a corpus of 45,000 subversive Twitter messages collected from October 2014 to December 2016. We present a qualitative and quantitative analysis of the jihadist rhetoric in the corpus, examine the network of Twitter users, outline the technical procedure used to train the system, and discuss examples of use.
We have developed a system that automatically detects online jihadist hate speech with over 80% accuracy, by using techniques from Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning. The system is trained on a corpus of 45,000 subversive Twitter messages collected from October 2014 to December 2016. We present a qualitative and quantitative analysis of the jihadist rhetoric in the corpus, examine the network of Twitter users, outline the technical procedure used to train the system, and discuss examples of use.
Misogyny online in forms such as explicit rape threats has become so prevalent and rhetorically distinctive it resembles a new dialect or language. Much of this ‘Rapeglish’ is produced by members of an informal alliance of men’s groups online dubbed the ‘Manosphere’. As both a cyberhate researcher and cyberhate target, I have studied as well as contributed to feminist responses to Rapeglish. In 2016, for instance, I helped build a Random Rape Threat Generator (RRTG) – a computer program that splices, shuffles around, and re-stitches in novel combinations fragments of real-life Rapeglish to illustrate the formulaic, machine-like, and impersonal nature of misogynist discourse online. This article uses Yuri Lotman’s ideas about intra- and inter-cultural conflict involving something akin to the translation of a foreign language to frame the RRTG as one example of the way women are ‘talking back’ both to and with Rapeglish (the latter involving appropriations and subversions of the original discourse).
This Research Paper examines how the white supremacist movement Christian Identity emerged from a non-extremist forerunner known as British Israelism. By examining ideological shifts over the course of nearly a century, the paper seeks to identify key pivot points in the movement’s shift toward extremism and explain the process through which extremist ideologues construct and define in-group and out-group identities. Based on these findings, the paper proposes a new framework for analysing and understanding the behaviour and emergence of extremist groups. The proposed framework can be leveraged to design strategic counter-terrorism communications programmes using a linkage-based approach that deconstructs the process of extremist in-group and out-group definition. Future publications will continue this study, seeking to refine the framework and operationalise messaging recommendations.
Since the emergence of Web 2.0 and social media, a particularly toxic brand of antifeminism has become evident across a range of online networks and platforms. Despite multiple internal conflicts and contradictions, these diverse assemblages are generally united in their adherence to Red Pill “philosophy,” which purports to liberate men from a life of feminist delusion. This loose confederacy of interest groups, broadly known as the manosphere, has become the dominant arena for the communication of men’s rights in Western culture. This article identifies the key categories and features of the manosphere and subsequently seeks to theorize the masculinities that characterize this discursive space. The analysis reveals that, while there are some continuities with older variants of antifeminism, many of these new toxic assemblages appear to complicate the orthodox alignment of power and dominance with hegemonic masculinity by operationalizing tropes of victimhood, “beta masculinity,” and involuntary celibacy (incels). These new hybrid masculinities provoke important questions about the different functioning of male hegemony off- and online and indicate that the technological affordances of social media are especially well suited to the amplification of new articulations of aggrieved manhood.
The issue of hate speech has received significant attention from legal scholars and philosophers alike. But the vast majority of this attention has been focused on presenting and critically evaluating arguments for and against hate speech bans as opposed to the prior task of conceptually analysing the term ‘hate speech’ itself. This two-part article aims to put right that imbalance. It goes beyond legal texts and judgements and beyond the legal concept hate speech in an attempt to understand the general concept hate speech. And it does so using a range of well-known methods of conceptual analysis that are distinctive of analytic philosophy. One of its main aims is to explode the myth that emotions, feelings, or attitudes of hate or hatred are part of the essential nature of hate speech. It also argues that hate speech is best conceived as a family resemblances concept. One important implication is that when looking at the full range of ways of combating hate speech, including but not limited to the use of criminal law, there is every reason to embrace an understanding of hate speech as a heterogeneous collection of expressive phenomena. Another is that it would be unsound to reject hate speech laws on the premise that they are effectively in the business of criminalising emotions, feelings, or attitudes of hate or hatred.
This chapter examines language aggression against women in public online deliberation regarding crimes of violence against women. To do so, we draw upon a corpus of 460 unsolicited digital comments sent in response to four public service advertisements against women abuse posted on YouTube. Our analysis reveals that three patriarchal strategies of abuse — namely, minimize the abuse, deny its existence, and blame women — are enacted in the online discourse under scrutiny and shows how, at the micro-level of interaction, these strategies relate to social identity and gender ideology through complex processes of positive in-group description and negative out-group presentation. We also argue that despite the few comments that explicitly support abuse, this situation changes at implicit, indirect levels of discourse.
This article examines Rodger’s psychological dynamics, drawing on insights gained through an analysis of his autobiographical document. The article highlights Rodger's personality traits and his motivations for murder.
School shooters present a challenge to both forensic psychiatry and law enforcement agencies. The relatively small number of school shooters, their various characteristics, and the lack of in-depth analysis of all of the shooters prior to the shooting add complexity to our understanding of this problem. In this short paper, we introduce a new methodology for automatically profiling school shooters. The methodology involves automatic analysis of texts and the production of several measures relevant for the identification of the shooters. Comparing texts written by 6 school shooters to 6056 texts written by a comparison group of male subjects, we found that the shooters' texts scored significantly higher on the Narcissistic Personality dimension as well as on the Humilated and Revengeful dimensions. Using a ranking/prioritization procedure, similar to the one used for the automatic identification of sexual predators, we provide support for the validity and relevance of the proposed methodology.
This study investigates the communicative practices in English and German online discussion fora as exemplified by two thematically related sample threads. Combining first- and second-order approaches to (im-)politeness, the paper focuses on the question of how participants use intergroup rudeness as a means of in- and outgroup construction and examines how intergroup rudeness is metapragmatically negotiated as the discussions unfold. The results show that intergroup rudeness as well as metapragmatic comments are handled very differently in the two communities explored. Suggesting cultural preferences, there is a much higher degree of interactivity and a clear preference for negotiation at an interpersonal level in the German discussion group; its English counterpart favours negotiation at an intergroup level. Both threads provide metapragmatic evidence that the frequent use of rudeness tokens does not automatically make rudeness an accepted norm.
As video games have attracted more critical attention and theoretical discourse and games play a more visible part in our media landscape, the modern video game community impacts the wider world of online culture and warrants more detailed study. Using the case of the Dickwolves incident from Penny Arcade.com, the authors address issues of hypermasculinity and sexism within the gaming community and how this lens brings to light issues with a hostile response to the expression of a female identity or femininity. The authors argue that this case highlights how the hypermasculine discourse encourages the overt privileging of masculinity over femininity and discourages women from engaging in gendered discourse within the community.
This paper examines language aggression against women in public online deliberation regarding crimes of violence against women. To do so, we draw upon a corpus of 460 unsolicited digital comments sent in response to four public service advertisements against women abuse posted on YouTube. Our analysis reveals that three patriarchal strategies of abuse — namely, minimize the abuse, deny its existence, and blame women — are enacted in the online discourse under scrutiny and shows how, at the micro-level of interaction, these strategies relate to social identity and gender ideology through complex processes of positive in-group description and negative out-group presentation. We also argue that despite the few comments that
explicitly
support abuse, this situation changes at
implicit
,
indirect
levels of discourse.
Pattern is a package for Python 2.4+ with functionality for web mining (Google + Twitter + Wikipedia, web spider, HTML DOM parser), natural language processing (tagger/chunker, n-gram search, sentiment analysis, WordNet), machine learning (vector space model, k-means clustering, Naive Bayes + k-NN + SVM classifiers) and network analysis (graph centrality and visualization). It is well documented and bundled with 30+ examples and 350+ unit tests. The source code is licensed under BSD and available from http://www.clips.ua.ac.be/pages/pattern.
This paper investigates political homophily on Twitter. Using a combination of machine learning and social network analysis we classify users as Democrats or as Republicans based on the political content shared. We then investigate political homophily both in the network of reciprocated and nonreciprocated ties. We find that structures of political homophily differ strongly between Democrats and Republicans. In general, Democrats exhibit higher levels of political homophily. But Republicans who follow official Republican accounts exhibit higher levels of homophily than Democrats. In addition, levels of homophily are higher in the network of reciprocated followers than in the nonreciprocated network. We suggest that research on political homophily on the Internet should take the political culture and practices of users seriously.
Differences in the ways that men and women use language have long been of interest in the study of discourse. Despite extensive theorizing, actual empirical investigations have yet to converge on a coherent picture of gender differences in language. A significant reason is the lack of agreement over the best way to analyze language. In this research, gender differences in language use were examined using standardized categories to analyze a database of over 14,000 text files from 70 separate studies. Women used more words related to psychological and social processes. Men referred more to object properties and impersonal topics. Although these effects were largely consistent across different contexts, the pattern of variation suggests that gender differences are larger on tasks that place fewer constraints on language use.
This article discusses how the study of metaphoric and more generally, figurative language use contributes to critical discourse analysis (CDA). It shows how cognitive linguists’ recognition of metaphor as a fundamental means of concept- and argument-building can add to CDA's account of meaning constitution in the social context. It then discusses discrepancies between the early model of conceptual metaphor theory and empirical data and argues that discursive-pragmatic factors as well as sociolinguistic variation have to be taken into account in order to make cognitive analyses more empirically and socially relevant. In conclusion, we sketch a modified cognitive approach informed by Relevance Theory within CDA.
Authorship profiling problem is of growing importance in the global information environment, and can help police identify characteristics of the perpetrator of a crime when there are specific suspects to consider. The approach is to apply machine learning to text categorization, for which the corpus of training documents, each labeled according to its category for a particular profiling dimension is taken. The study outlined the kinds of text features that can be found most useful for authorship profiling. The two basic type of features include content based features, and style based features, which reflect the fact that different populations might tend to write about different topics as well as to express themselves differently about the same topic. There are four profiling problems such as determining the author's gender, age, native language, and neuroticism level for the experimental setup. The right combination of linguistic features and machine learning methods enables an automated system to effectively determine such aspects of an anonymous author.
While online, some people self-disclose or act out more frequently or intensely than they would in person. This article explores six factors that interact with each other in creating this online disinhibition effect: dissociative anonymity, invisibility, asynchronicity, solipsistic introjection, dissociative imagination, and minimization of authority. Personality variables also will influence the extent of this disinhibition. Rather than thinking of disinhibition as the revealing of an underlying "true self," we can conceptualize it as a shift to a constellation within self-structure, involving clusters of affect and cognition that differ from the in-person constellation.
This article undertakes the first known qualitative study focusing on The Red Pill, an online forum wherein heterosexual men attempt to improve their seduction skills by discussing evolutionary psychology and economic theories. My content analysis of twenty-six documents (130,000 words) designated by the community as central to its purpose and ideology shows that The Red Pill is not just an expression of hegemonic masculinity but also explicitly integrates neoliberal and scientific discourses into its seduction strategies. I theorize that the resulting philosophy superficially resolves a contradiction between hegemonic masculinity’s prescriptive emotional walls and an inherent desire for connection by constructing women as exchangeable commodities.
In understanding the influence of virtual communities on its members, examined in this chapter is the role of identity — the member’s conscious knowledge of belonging and the emotional and evaluative significance attached to the membership. Drawing from research and analyses across different disciplines, we present an integrative framework considering and elaborating on the motivational antecedents, constituents, and consequents of virtual community identity. We also discuss its implications for virtual community organizers and highlight promising research opportunities in this area. Purchase this chapter to continue reading all 16 pages >
The very notion of community in an online context can begin a hot debate. Those who would keep the term 'community' for the imagined ideal of cooperation and joint sharing of land, resources, and goals ask: How can community exist without physical co-location and a geographic touchstone? How can the leanness of computermediated communication support the richness inherent in a community? This article revisits the debate about community and online community, and offers a means of conceptualizing and investigating online community using a social network perspective that frees it from its former geographical constraints. It begins with a look at the challenges to community that have fed into arguments against online community, and with a section on the discovery of community online. The article then addresses the case for a network view of community, starting with how the social network approach has been applied to offline communities and how this lays the groundwork for unbundling community from face-to-face interaction and geographic co-location. Following a brief section on the basics of social-network terminology, it returns to the main topic of community, with a focus on the network-level aspects of community, showing how patterns of interpersonal ties can build a network with outcomes greater than the sum of the pairwise connections. The final sections explore variants on the theme of community, first by revisiting the online and offline dichotomy and addressing the advantages, and indeed the inevitability, of considering community from both online and offline sides.
In Chap. 9, we studied the extraction of structured data from Web pages. The Web also contains a huge amount of information in unstructured texts. Analyzing these texts is of great importance as well and perhaps even more important than extracting structured data because of the sheer volume of valuable information of almost any imaginable type contained in text. In this chapter, we only focus on mining opinions which indicate positive or negative sentiments. The task is technically challenging and practically very useful. For example, businesses always want to find public or consumer opinions on their products and services. Potential customers also want to know the opinions of existing users before they use a service or purchase a product.
We report on a series of experiments with convolutional neural networks (CNN)
trained on top of pre-trained word vectors for sentence-level classification
tasks. We first show that a simple CNN with little hyperparameter tuning and
static vectors achieves excellent results on multiple benchmarks. Learning
task-specific vectors through fine-tuning offers further gains in performance.
We additionally propose a simple modification to the architecture to allow for
the use of both task-specific and static word vectors. The CNN models discussed
herein improve upon the state-of-the-art on 4 out of 7 tasks, which include
sentiment analysis and question classification.
In recent years, the mainstream media has identified on-line vitriol as a worsening problem which is silencing women in public discourse, and is having a deleterious effect on the civility of the public cybersphere. This article examines the disconnect between representations of “e-bile” in media texts, and representations of e-bile in academic literature. An exhaustive review of thirty years of academic work on “flaming” shows that many theorists have routinely trivialized the experiences of flame targets, while downplaying, defending, and/or celebrating the discourse circulated by flame producers. Much contemporary scholarship, meanwhile, ignores e-bile completely. My argument is that this constitutes a form of chauvinism (in that it disregards women's experiences in on-line environments) and represents a failure of both theoretical acuity and nerve (given that it evades such a pervasive aspect of contemporary culture). The aim of this paper is not only to help establish the importance of on-line vitriol as a topic for interdisciplinary scholarly research, but to assist in establishing a theoretical problematic where what is seen is barely regarded as a problem. Overall, my argument is that—far from being a technology-related moral panic—e-bile constitutes a field of inquiry with a pressing need for recalibrated scholarly intervention.
The proliferation of online hate groups over the past few years has brought two main issues into focus. First, legal and political scholars have questioned the extent to which such hate speech should be regulated. Second, and perhaps more importantly, there is a great deal of concern about the effects of hate expressed online - specifically, if it incites violence and hostility between groups in the physical world. Understanding cyberhate therefore provides an important challenge for psychologists. Specifically, it is important to understand why online hate is so widespread and the content of online hate sites often so insulting and aggressive, given that the physical activities of hate groups are much more covert. This article attempts to provide a psychological perspective on the nature and purpose of online hate groups and their underlying motivations, their strategies, psychological theories and research that provide insight into disinhibited online behaviour, the actions being taken to combat cyberhate, and some challenges for future research.
This article explores the signal characteristics of gendered vitriol on the Internet – a type of discourse marked by graphic threats of sexual violence, explicit ad hominem invective and unapologetic misogyny. Such ‘e-bile’ is proliferating in the cybersphere and is currently the subject of widespread international media coverage. Yet it receives little attention in scholarship. This is likely related to the fact that discourse of this type is metaphorically ‘unspeakable’, in that its hyperbolic profanity locates it well outside the norms of what is regarded as ‘civil’ discourse. My case, however, is that – despite the risk of causing offence – this discourse must not only be spoken of, but must be spoken of in its unexpurgated entirety. There is, I argue, no other way to adequately assay the nature of a communication mode whose misogynistic hostility has serious ethical and material implications, not least because it has become a lingua franca in many sectors of the cybersphere. Proceeding via unexpurgated ostension is also the best – arguably the only – way to begin mapping the blurry parameters of the discursive field of e-bile, and from there to conduct further inquiry into the ethical appraisal of putative online hostility, and the consideration of possible remedies.
The use of stylometry, authorship recognition through purely linguistic means, has contributed to literary, historical, and criminal investigation breakthroughs. Existing stylometry research assumes that authors have not attempted to disguise their linguistic writing style. We challenge this basic assumption of existing stylometry methodologies and present a new area of research: adversarial stylometry. Adversaries have a devastating effect on the robustness of existing classification methods. Our work presents a framework for creating adversarial passages including obfuscation, where a subject attempts to hide her identity, and imitation, where a subject attempts to frame another subject by imitating his writing style, and translation where original passages are obfuscated with machine translation services. This research demonstrates that manual circumvention methods work very well while automated translation methods are not effective. The obfuscation method reduces the techniques' effectiveness to the level of random guessing and the imitation attempts succeed up to 67% of the time depending on the stylometry technique used. These results are more significant given the fact that experimental subjects were unfamiliar with stylometry, were not professional writers, and spent little time on the attacks. This article also contributes to the field by using human subjects to empirically validate the claim of high accuracy for four current techniques (without adversaries). We have also compiled and released two corpora of adversarial stylometry texts to promote research in this field with a total of 57 unique authors. We argue that this field is important to a multidisciplinary approach to privacy, security, and anonymity.
Anonymity is thought to be an important means for ensuring a free exchange of ideas by encouraging the expression of minority viewpoints. However, we suggest that anonymity’s reduction in awareness of others potentially affects the expression and interpretation of comments that are made during a discussion. In particular, anonymity will increase the likelihood that comments will be made that are contrary to the majority opinion while at the same time decreasing the effect that those contrary arguments have on other group member’s opinions. This paper reports experimental results showing that anonymity led to more overall participation in discussions of ethical scenarios. However, equality of member participation did not differ between anonymous and member-identified groups, and anonymous groups had significantly higher awareness-related comments. This leads to the conclusion that additional participation in anonymous groups accommodates reduced awareness rather than reflecting the increased participation of normally reticent group members. In addition, anonymity led to more arguments in support of questionable behavior, suggesting that the freeing effects of anonymity apply to the social desirability of arguments. Finally, there was less change in opinion under conditions of anonymity than when comments were identified, suggesting that anonymous arguments have less influence on opinions than identified comments.
Using a life course perspective, we explored the development and maintenance of involuntary celibacy for 82 respondents recruited over the I'nternet. Data were collected using an open‐ended electronic questionnaire. Modified grounded theory analysis yielded three groups of involuntary celibates, persons desiring to have sex but unable to find partners. Virgins were those who had never had sex, singles had sex in the past but were unable to establish current sexual relationships, and part‐nereds were currently in sexless relationships. These groups differed on dating experiences, the circumstances surrounding their celibacy, barriers to sexual activity, and the perceived likelihood of becoming sexually active. They were similar, however, in their negative reactions to celibacy. Pervasive in our respondents’ accounts was the theme of becoming and remaining off time in making normative sexual transitions, which in turn perpetuated a celibate life course or trajectory.
This study explores whether the attributes listed in the literature on flaming in email are considered characteristic of flaming by actual email users. Through the creation of a semantic differential scale—called the Message Invectives Scale—the study took eight concepts found in more than 20 research articles on flaming and examined email users' responses to a set of 20 messages in relation to those eight characteristics. Findings indi- cate that in each of the 20 cases, six of the original eight concepts relate to each other to form a common set, which also correlates positively with perceptions of flaming. Some of the messages that scored high for flaming contained profanity, all capital let- ters, excessive exclamation points or question marks, indicating that these attributes also relate to flaming. Based on these findings, recommendations are advanced as to how email should be used to avoid negative attributes that can lead to organizational conflict.
We describe new algorithms for training tagging models, as an alternative to maximum-entropy models or conditional random fields (CRFs). The algorithms rely on Viterbi decoding of training examples, combined with simple additive updates. We describe theory justifying the algorithms through a modification of the proof of convergence of the perceptron algorithm for classification problems. We give experimental results on part-of-speech tagging and base noun phrase chunking, in both cases showing improvements over results for a maximum-entropy tagger.
Cybermobbing aus sprachwissenschaftlicher Perspektive
- Marx
Marx, Konstanze. 2018. "Cybermobbing aus sprachwissenschaftlicher Perspektive. "
Sprachreport 1/18: 1-9. https://ids-pub.bsz-bw.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/7209
Reluctant Virginity: The Relationship between Sexual Status and Self-esteem
- DiMauro
DiMauro, Dina. 2008. "Reluctant Virginity: The Relationship between Sexual Status and Selfesteem. " Theses and Dissertations 717. http://rdw.rowan.edu/etd/717
Defusing Hate: A Strategic Communication Guide to Counteract Dangerous Speech
- Rachel Brown
Brown, Rachel. 2016. Defusing Hate: A Strategic Communication Guide to Counteract
Dangerous Speech. https://www.ushmm.org/m/pdfs/20160229-Defusing-Hate-Guide.pdf
Keras: Deep Learning Library for Theano and Tensorflow
- François Chollet
Chollet, François. 2015. Keras: Deep Learning Library for Theano and Tensorflow.
https://keras.io
Gendertrolling: How Misogyny Went Viral
- Karla Mantilla
Mantilla, Karla, ed. 2015. Gendertrolling: How Misogyny Went Viral. Santa Barbara, CA:
Praeger Press.
The Secret Life of Pronouns. What our Words Say about us
- James W Pennebaker
Pennebaker, James W. 2011. The Secret Life of Pronouns. What our Words Say about us. New
York: Bloomsbury.
Digesting the Red Pill: Masculinity and Neoliberalism in the Manosphere
- Anna K Turnage
Turnage, Anna K. 2007. "Email Flaming Behaviors and Organizational Conflict. " Computer-Mediated Communication 13(1):43-59. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1083-6101.2007.00385.x
Van Valkenburgh, Shawn P. 2018. "Digesting the Red Pill: Masculinity and Neoliberalism in
the Manosphere. " Men and Masculinities. https://doi.org/10.1177/1097184X18816118